Biblio
In this paper, we outline a novel, forward error correction-based information hiding technique for adaptive rate wireless communication systems. Specifically, we propose leveraging the functionality of wireless local area network modulation and coding schemes (MCS) and link adaptation mechanisms to significantly increase covert channel throughput. After describing our generalized information hiding model, we detail implementation of this technique within the IEEE 802.11ad, directional multi-Gigabit standard. Simulation results demonstrate the potential of the proposed techniques to develop reliable, high-throughput covert channels under multiple MCS rates and embedding techniques. Covert channel performance is evaluated in terms of the observed packet error ratio of the underlying communication system as well as the bit error ratio of the hidden data.
An experiment and numerical simulations analyze low-speed OSC derived XPM-induced phase noise penalty in 100-Gbps WDM systems. WDM transmission performance exhibits signal bit-pattern dependence on OSC, which is due to deterioration in SD-FEC performance.
Quantum low probability of intercept transmits ciphertext in a way that prevents an eavesdropper possessing the decryption key from recovering the plaintext. It is capable of Gbps communication rates on optical fiber over metropolitan-area distances.
We demonstrate secure fiber-optic transmission utilizing quantum-noise signal masking by 217-level random phase modulation. Masking of 157 signal phase levels at a BER of HD-FEC threshold is achieved without significant impacts on the transmission performance.
The paper introduces a method of efficient partial firmware update with several advantages compared to common methods. The amount of data to transfer for an update is reduced, the energetic efficiency is increased and as the method is designed for over the air update, the radio spectrum occupancy is decreased. Herein described approach uses Lua scripting interface to introduce updatable fragments of invokable native code. This requires a dedicated memory layout, which is herein introduced. This method allows not only to distribute patches for deployed systems, but also on demand add-ons. At the end, the security aspects of proposed firmware update system is discussed and its limitations are presented.
Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is an experimental transport protocol designed to primarily reduce connection establishment and transport latency, as well as to improve security standards with default end-to-end encryption in HTTPbased applications. QUIC is a multiplexed and secure transport protocol fostered by Google and its design emerged from the urgent need of innovation in the transport layer, mainly due to difficulties extending TCP and deploying new protocols. While still under standardisation, a non-negligble fraction of the Internet's traffic, more than 7% of a European Tier1-ISP, is already running over QUIC and it constitutes more than 30% of Google's egress traffic [1].
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are state-of-the-art communication environments that offer various applications with distinct requirements. However, security in CPS is a nonnegotiable concept, since without a proper security mechanism the applications of CPS may risk human lives, the privacy of individuals, and system operations. In this paper, we focus on PHY-layer security approaches in CPS to prevent passive eavesdropping attacks, and we propose an integration of physical layer operations to enhance security. Thanks to the McEliece cryptosystem, error injection is firstly applied to information bits, which are encoded with the forward error correction (FEC) schemes. Golay and Hamming codes are selected as FEC schemes to satisfy power and computational efficiency. Then obtained codewords are transmitted across reliable intermediate relays to the legitimate receiver. As a performance metric, the decoding frame error rate of the eavesdropper is analytically obtained for the fragmentary existence of significant noise between relays and Eve. The simulation results validate the analytical calculations, and the obtained results show that the number of low-quality channels and the selected FEC scheme affects the performance of the proposed model.
Originally implemented by Google, QUIC gathers a growing interest by providing, on top of UDP, the same service as the classical TCP/TLS/HTTP/2 stack. The IETF will finalise the QUIC specification in 2019. A key feature of QUIC is that almost all its packets, including most of its headers, are fully encrypted. This prevents eavesdropping and interferences caused by middleboxes. Thanks to this feature and its clean design, QUIC is easier to extend than TCP. In this paper, we revisit the reliable transmission mechanisms that are included in QUIC. More specifically, we design, implement and evaluate Forward Erasure Correction (FEC) extensions to QUIC. These extensions are mainly intended for high-delays and lossy communications such as In-Flight Communications. Our design includes a generic FEC frame and our implementation supports the XOR, Reed-Solomon and Convolutional RLC error-correcting codes. We also conservatively avoid hindering the loss-based congestion signal by distinguishing the packets that have been received from the packets that have been recovered by the FEC. We evaluate its performance by applying an experimental design covering a wide range of delay and packet loss conditions with reproducible experiments. These confirm that our modular design allows the protocol to adapt to the network conditions. For long data transfers or when the loss rate and delay are small, the FEC overhead negatively impacts the download completion time. However, with high packet loss rates and long delays or smaller files, FEC allows drastically reducing the download completion time by avoiding costly retransmission timeouts. These results show that there is a need to use FEC adaptively to the network conditions.
This article presents a practical approach for secure key exchange exploiting reciprocity in wireless transmission. The method relies on the reciprocal channel phase to mask points of a Phase Shift Keying (PSK) constellation. Masking is achieved by adding (modulo 2π) the measured reciprocal channel phase to the PSK constellation points carrying some of the key bits. As the channel phase is uniformly distributed in [0, 2π], knowing the sum of the two phases does not disclose any information about any of its two components. To enlarge the key size over a static or slow fading channel, the Radio Frequency (RF) propagation path is perturbed to create independent realizations of multi-path fading. Prior techniques have relied on quantizing the reciprocal channel state measured at the two ends and thereby suffer from information leakage in the process of key consolidation (ensuring the two ends have access to the same key). The proposed method does not suffer from such shortcomings as raw key bits can be equipped with Forward Error Correction (FEC) without affecting the masking (zero information leakage) property. To eavesdrop a phase value shared in this manner, the Eavesdropper (Eve) would require to solve a system of linear equations defined over angles, each equation corresponding to a possible measurement by the Eve. Channel perturbation is performed such that each new channel state creates an independent channel realization for the legitimate nodes, as well as for each of Eves antennas. As a result, regardless of the Eves Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and number of antennas, Eve will always face an under-determined system of equations. On the other hand, trying to solve any such under-determined system of linear equations in terms of an unknown phase will not reveal any useful information about the actual answer, meaning that the distribution of the answer remains uniform in [0, 2π].